Sacrifice of Sense

People who like to make quiet remarks about means determining ends can pick few worse times than an American Presidential campaign in which to make them. The man who is more used to having his intelligence and his sanity insulted by political performers will think such remarks naive. He knows what to expect, and he can regard two months of illogicality, inconsistency, inanity and juvenility with only occasional feelings of revulsion.

Even so tolerant a man, however, may begin to wonder how much he can stand after the show the two candidates put on this week. Speaking on Tuesday in West Orange, N.J., vice-President Nixon told an enthusiastic audience that his opponent's farm program would raise family food costs by 25 per cent, reduce beef and pork supplies to wartime rationed levels and put two million people out of work. He added that Democratic farm proposals would drive a million people "now engaged in serving the needs of farm people" into unemployment, would encourage Soviet agricultural supremacy, and would raise the consumer price index by six per cent.

On what facts he based the statistics and assertions that he so authoritatively delivered the vice-President did not bother to say. Yet Nixon was not the only public figure playing around with economics last Tuesday. In an attempt to comfort voters worried about rising taxes in a state which he is unlikely to win--Indiana--Senator Kennedy attacked the Republican administration as "wasteful" and advertised an impending Democratic government as an "economical one." "I believe in a balanced budget and an honest dollar," Kennedy shouted to a crowd in Indianapolis.

When Kennedy called for "sacrifice" (a word he hasn't been using much recently) in his acceptance speech at Los Angeles, what did he think he meant by it? Sacrifice is not entirely an imponderable something the American people are going to be able to give to the country without feeling it. Neither party's talk of national goals has any significance at all without talk of how it is to be payed for.

Yet Kennedy and Nixon have chosen not to indulge in such unpleasant talk. Maybe their most recent campaign tactics will make some of the most jaded of the electorate get mad enough to demand less garbage, more sense.